How to be more disciplined and better at not spending money on small unnecessary things

My husband and I have no discipline when it comes to spending money. Or, rather, I have semi-consistent discipline and he is good about sticking to a budget when I make it and make us stick to it, but I don't always do that, if that makes sense.

Lately we have been running low on money. We are having to travel to my hometown (2,000 miles away) by plane several times for my sister's upcoming wedding and related events. (I am MOH and he is a groomsman, and there is her shower and both of their Bach. Parties).

We have our own business (I have a law practice and he helps me run it-- by being the paralegal, IT guy, client coordinator etc.) so our income really varies. Usually we pay for things with a credit card (business and personal expenses) and then pay it off in full when the bill comes. (We do have personal and business bank accounts and don't co-mingle the money). However with the wedding expenses things are getting tight and I a,m getting stressed worrying about upcoming bills, even though we're consumer debt free (we have student loans and a mortgage).

Also, I would rather save money for our upcoming baby and other goals (retirement, paying off our house faster, etc.) than spend money unnecessarily. I own/have tried YNAB but it gets exhausting every night to ask my husband what he's spent money on and enter it all in etc. I also have the business finances to take care of so I feel like all I ever do is input transactions.

Does anyone have any helpful tips? I've posted our budget here before and followed all suggestions and there were no more ways to tweak it. I think I'm looking for practical tips as to how to stick to the theoretical budget. And how to make it easiest with two people involved. We have a joint bank account and all of that. Should we use an envelope system for everyday purchases since we're not very disciplined? It would also be easier to not have to track every little purchase. But what categories get envelopes? We are bad about stopping for coffee and burritos at gas stations (which, when I'm keeping the budget, go under restaurants/eating out), sometimes buying takeout or fast food unexpectedly (ditto), and my husband is really bad about adding beer, wine, Gatorade, or energy drinks at the grocery store or gas station check-out, which are super expensive and drive me crazy. Luckily I despise shopping so it's not usually a problem of buying clothes etc. (sometimes books for my kindle or something online from etsy.... Obviously envelopes wouldn't work for those purchases), and we used to go out way too much but with this pregnancy being rather physically exhausting, we mostly stay home (but again order take out or delivery or he'll want beer or wine with dinner etc.) I have such a hard time keeping track of all of this little stuff or cutting it down. I'm not a very detailed or numbers- oriented person. And he is even worse at that stuff. Any advice?

Comments (12)

We use Mint because there is no way I (or especially my DH) would enter...

Posted
03/09/2014

We use Mint because there is no way I (or especially my DH) would enter transactions every day or save our receipts. I spent 5 minutes categorizing transactions in Mint every few days and it sends us emails if we go over in any particular category. We can see how much we have left in any given category by just checking the app on our phone when we are out.

Honestly, though, a big part of it is just changing habits. Bringing coffee from home every morning instead of buying it. Packing snacks and drinks when we're going to be out instead of going to a restaurant or grabbing fast food. Staying out of the stores and the malls (this is huge- I even grocery shopped online for quite a while so that I could make sure I stuck to the budget and avoided impulse purchases.) I just recently started grocery shopping at Target again some weeks, and now have no problem sticking to my list. I spent $85 on groceries this morning, which is the best I've ever done.

If you don't save your receipts how do you know what to categorize everything as in Mint? This is an argument against YNAB I never understood, because with YNAB if you decide not to manually enter, you can just download once or twice a week from your bank and do the same thing. That's the way I used to do it until the app came out.

Me and DH have similar problems, but I realized that tracking our spending and changing habits is the only way around it. We started using YNAB and we enter transactions on the iPhone app, takes seconds. Alternatively you can also do an instant import periodically. With YNAB I finally found out where our money is going, as my estimates before were not accurate. Changing habits is also a good advice, although sometimes hard to stick to :(